Has the base of the Republican Party dumbed down even further since the election of George W. Bush? NBC political correspondent Kasie Hunt believes so and she thinks that Ted Cruz, despite his far-right rhetoric, won’t get past the primaries because of his educational pedigree.

KASIE HUNT, NBC NEWS: To give you a sense of Cruz and where he has come from, this has been a very rapid rise. He’s only 44 years old. He was born in Canada, but he renounced his Canadian citizenship over the past year. He grew up in Houston, attended Princeton and Harvard. So, not necessarily the type of pedigree that would immediately seem to appeal to the base of the party, but at the same time those are the voters he is going after here.

He also clerked at the Supreme Court, was Texas Solicitor General, and worked on the 2000 Bush campaign. He was a lawyer actually working on the Florida recount. He was elected first to the Senate just in 2012. So there are many Republicans in his party who think that this step is a little bit ambitious for somebody who has only been in the Senate for about three years, but Cruz has been unapologetic and straightforward about his ambitions to run for president, and that’s led him here today becoming the first Republican to announce he will run for president in 2016.

Author: Wendy GittlesonPolitical pundit, small business marketing guru, business blogger -- a true renaissance woman, which apparently makes her really old.
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